Apple lossless audio codec (ALAC)

Apple Lossless AudioCodec (ALAC) is an audio codec for lossless audio compression, comparable to the FLAC code c and the container formats of the WAV file format and the AIFF file format.

With ALAC, the audio data is reduced by about 40%. The data reduction is done bit by bit and can be reconstructed back to the original PCM signal. There is no loss of quality. ALAC is a predictive process in which the residual signal is encoded. The computational effort for decoding is relatively low.

The audio signals compressed with ALAC can be played on iPhones, iPads and iPods.